The morning had started with Andrew dragging a stool to the fridge and using it to gain access to the freezer. Rob had come out into the kitchen to find him at the table with a carton of ice cream, patiently chiseling out small bits with a spoon.

"What are you doing?" Rob asked him.

"I got ice cream."

"No ice cream for breakfast. Maybe tonight if you eat a good dinner."

"I have ice cream for lunch."

He would be having lunch at school that day and ice cream was unlikely. Rob figured it was best not to remind him of that since he would probably forget in five minutes anyway. Kate had left early for a breakfast meeting with her board of directors, leaving Rob with the busy morning routine of getting the boys dressed and ready for school. The boys woke up with much more energy than he did and it was never a dull moment in those first few hours of the day. He might have been too busy to even notice Monika coming upstairs were it not for the smell of coffee that accompanied her. She really loved that Keurig machine.

"Monika, what you drink?" Lucas asked.

"Coffee."

"Can I have some?"

"No," Rob said. "Coffee's gross. Ick!"

They laughed at his exaggerated facial expression while Monika tried in vain to protest. As he began to pack their lunchboxes, he noticed that she was looking at him with an expression of vague concern. She had been doing that a lot lately and he wasn't sure why. He had his shit together at the moment, at least by his standards.
After dropping the twins off at school, he returned home to find Monika examining his movie collection. Her choice for the day - Citizen Kane, a film school staple with a formidable reputation as the best movie ever made. She had clearly been using that laptop to research the history of movies if she chose that out of the hundreds of films on the shelves.

Of course, the problem with Citizen Kane was that its "greatest movie of all time" label inevitably led to disappointment. What film could possibly live up to those expectations? Sure enough, Monika came out two hours later confessing to feeling underwhelmed. Rob gave her his take on it, which was that the question of the best movie ever had to be left up to each individual viewer, but that Citizen Kane was still a key part of film history. The versatile cinematography and non-linear story structure was way outside the box for 1941 and its subsequent influence on generations of directors was its major claim to fame.

After listening to his impromptu lecture, Monika had a question. It wasn't one he was expecting.

"Rob, who do you like more? Me or Princess Peach?"

It wasn't often that he was speechless, but she had pulled it off. Was that a joke? It must have been, but her stern expression suggested otherwise.

"Princess Peach? Where did you come up with that? She's not real, you are."

"You could argue that I wasn't real until a few days ago."

"Whoa," Rob said, shaking his head in amazement. "I think you just blew my mind. Are you saying we could bring Princess Peach here? If she brought some of that royal fortune with her, that would be a big help."

Monika looked like she might cry. This really wasn't a joke.

"Monika!" he said, trying not to laugh but still letting a mild chuckle get through. "Of course I like you better. Do you have any other questions about Citizen Kane?"

She didn't and began to browse the internet on her laptop. Rob left the room still in disbelief at the conversation they just had. It made some sense that as a video game character herself, Monika might see another character as a potential rival, but he was still having a hard time applying that logic to reality. To him, she was as real as anyone else. She was living in his house, sharing his food, she had even kissed him for God's sake.

He sat with his own computer and spent the rest of the morning doing a mixture of work for his job and just general internet reading. He had about an hour left before he had to go pick up the boys and realized it would now be about 8:00 in the morning in New Zealand. He went on Facebook to see if Alex was online and sure enough he was. The message system on Facebook was their preferred way of communicating when he was overseas since their locations didn't matter, unlike with a cellphone.

Rob: What's up? You settling in okay?

Alex: Yeah. I shake off the jet lag quicker each time. Must be getting used to the change.

Rob: I bet Charlotte was happy to see you.

Alex: We're at her parents place in Tauranga. It's like 85 degrees here.

Rob: Jeez. It's still butt-ass cold here. I go outside and I feel like I could snap my nuts off like a graham cracker.

Alex: How's video game girl?

Rob had done his best to explain the Monika situation to his brother shortly after she arrived. He wasn't sure Alex believed him but there wasn't any good reason to make something like that up so they were going with it for now.

Rob: I think she's doing better, even though this morning she was actually jealous of Princess Peach.

Alex: She should be, dude. Smash Brothers? Mario Kart? Mario Party? Peach has been the other woman in your life for years!

Rob: I'm not sure how that happened. I just seem to have an affinity with her in those games. I guess I can't ever play Smash with Monika. Getting her ass kicked by Peach could be traumatic.

Alex: LOL yeah I wouldn't.

Things settled into a comfortable rhythm for the next two weeks or so. Monika watched a movie almost every day, whether he was home or not. Vertigo was the film typically considered the biggest threat to Citizen Kane's supremacy, so she watched that one next and wasn't a huge fan. The themes about obsession might have been uncomfortable for her given her experiences. It did lead her into a run through some of Alfred Hitchcock's films - classics like Psycho, Strangers on a Train and Rob's personal favorite, Rear Window. He also got her to watch some of Hitchcock's movies that were lesser known but still great, like The Lady Vanishes and Sabotage.

Regardless of what she had decided to watch, however, the highlight for him was talking with her about them afterwards. There was a time in his life when he had dreams of being a film professor himself, but that was before the bills for his undergraduate tuition started to come. He had a two-prong focus while at college - Cinema Studies and Journalism. Rob figured you could combine them into some pretty solid qualifications for a film critic, but he realized too late that he was entering the working world at a time when traditional film criticism was dying out. There would always be people on the internet with opinions, but getting paid for those opinions was a different story. His thoughts shifted to teaching, but that would require at least a master's degree. He would have to pay for more school in addition to spending a fortune on some New York City apartment that probably wouldn't be much larger than a broom closet. Another ambition crushed by the reality of dollars and cents.

When he was home, they would often watch the movies together, with Monika constantly testing the boundaries between them. Most of the time, she just leaned against him a little bit but on days when she was feeling especially bold, she would hold his hand. It made Rob nervous sometimes, but he couldn't always resist that primal feeling of warmth and peace that came from being close to someone. How long had it been since he and Kate had just sat together quietly like this? Before they began living separate lives? He wasn't sure what to do about it, but he knew it was his fault.

One day when he wasn't going into work, he decided it was time to share something special with Monika. He had been waiting for this.

"So do you feel like you're starting to get into a groove with the movies?" he asked.

"Yeah!" Monika said excitedly. "I've learned a lot in just a couple weeks."

"I bet you have," he said, unable to hide his eagerness. "But it's time to forget everything you think you know." He grabbed a movie off the shelf and handed it to her. She didn't know what to make of it.

"The Room?"

It might have been too early to show her this, but he couldn't wait any longer. Without any effort to manage her expectations, how long would it take for her to figure out on her own that this movie was horrible? A horrible masterpiece, that is.

Her first major reaction was the classic flower shop scene, where Tommy Wiseau stops in to get some flowers for his "future wife" Lisa.

"Can I have a dozen red roses please?"

"Oh hi Johnny, I didn't know it was you. Here you go."

"That's me! How much is it?"

"That will be 18 dollars."

"Here you go. Keep the change. Hi doggy!"

"You're my favorite customer."

"Thanks a lot. Bye."

Rob struggled against the enormous laughs that wanted to come out when Monika turned to him with a strange look on her face. "That was, um….like really fast? What was going on there?"

"He's her favorite customer," he replied before turning to bury a laugh in his hands. He had also forgotten just how many sex scenes were in the first act of this movie.

"Is this your way of trying to tell me something?" Monika teased.

"You want me to hump your belly button?"

"Oh my God, that is what he's doing, isn't it? And why do we have to see his ugly butt? What the fuck is this movie?!"

That was it. Hearing her drop her first F-bomb (at least in his presence) finally made him laugh out loud. She turned to him.

"Rob, are you playing a joke on me? Is that what this is?"

"Just keep watching."

She was quiet again until Lisa's mother shared some important news.

"I got the results of the test today. I definitely have breast cancer."

"Pay attention to that," Rob lied. "It might be important later."

"Look, don't worry about it," Lisa said. "Everything will be fine."

Monika didn't care for that. "That's not what you say in a situation like that!"

Later, Tommy (or Johnny, whatever) walked out onto a rooftop in the midst of an angry rant. "I did not hit her! It's not true! It's bullshit! I did not hit her! I did naaat. Oh hi, Mark."

"What? WHAT?!" She was finally starting to laugh.

"I once knew a girl," Mark was telling Johnny, "She had a dozen guys. One of them found out, beat her up so bad she ended up in a hospital on Guerrero Street."

Johnny laughed. "What a story, Mark!"

Monika slapped her forehead with her hand. "That is not funny! Why would you laugh at that?!"

"I can not even tell you how much fun I'm having right now," Rob said. "I could die happy."

She cast him an unexpectedly scared look. "I was just kidding," he sheepishly added.

"You're lying!" Johnny was yelling at Lisa. "I never hit you! You are TEARING ME APART, Lisa!"

"He's trying so hard," Monika observed. "But it's just not working. It's kind of amazing."

"You know there's another movie that's all about how this movie got made," Rob said. "I'll grab it whenever they release it on Blu-ray."

By the time they got to the second half, she seemed to understand the sort of movie she was watching and laughed herself silly until Johnny shot himself at the end. At that point, Monika gasped. Rob was surprised, especially since the suicide scene was just as poorly executed as everything else, yet it really seemed to bother her. It might have had something to do with Sayori. They hadn't really talked about that but it must have weighed heavily on her. But soon enough, Denny was shouting "Leave us!" and she was laughing again.

"I understand now," she said during the end credits. "I've been watching so many good movies that you thought I should see a bad one."

He nodded. "So what did you think?"

"I think I actually enjoyed it more than Citizen Kane."